The seeds of the album were first planted a decade ago during Arcade Fire's first tour of Japan. Parry hung around Japan for several weeks after the tour ended, finding himself in a monastery, an experience he describes in a press release as "the biggest silence you've ever heard."

Parry elaborated in a previous press release: "The song 'On the Ground' was inspired by an encounter with ghost voices in a Japanese forest near a temple on the mountain Koya-Sān. I told director Caleb Wood the story - of being alone in this magical environment of giant cedar trees and hearing a loud chorus of powerful harmony singing that sounded inexplicably identical to my late father's folk band the Friends of Fiddler's Green, who were the soundtrack to my entire childhood and upbringing."

Parry also had this to say about the album in the press release: "I'm lousy at sitting still and being nothing. But being out in the natural world or being immersed in music is the meditation for me. That's the heart of this record: the experience of transcending the place that you're in, getting lost in the feeling of where you end and where the world begins, in a dreamlike world of music and thought."